


dancing the dark turmoil

by andibeth82



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Compliant, Clint Barton's Farm, Comfort/Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-05
Updated: 2015-06-05
Packaged: 2018-04-03 01:37:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4081546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andibeth82/pseuds/andibeth82
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You’re my best friend,” and okay, maybe she is a little tipsy but maybe she’s also thinking of New York and being reminded of how damn close she came to losing him, something she forgets about it until they share a dumb moment over beer, away from the distractions of a fire fight or the world ending. She curls her fingers into his shoulder and Clint runs a hand over her hair.</p><p>“Was I ever not?”</p><p>[or, one night at Clint's farm]</p>
            </blockquote>





	dancing the dark turmoil

**Author's Note:**

> Upon my (redacted) viewing of AoU, I started thinking a little too much about the scene at the farm, and about the state of Clint and Nat following Wanda's attack. And I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to try to get some story out of what might have allowed them to arrive at the places they were in when they finally moved on. 
> 
> Thank you to **gecko** for beta, remaining mistakes my own.

Before she hears his voice, before she feels the dip in the quinjet’s navigation, she knows Barton’s taking them to the farm.

She’s not surprised. Not really. He’s the only one besides Stark that’s technically left standing, if Natasha could even call what Tony is doing “standing.” From what she can tell (and she’s had more than enough experience watching the billionaire try to prove himself), it’s more like he’s exercising a patented version of being okay, because he needs to be, because there’s not one damn other person aside from Clint who is. And if she had to choose, she can’t say she wouldn’t prefer to end up somewhere that’s familiar -- even if it’s somewhere that she knows will require putting on a face.

It had been like this once, she thinks, as the usually smooth jet twitches slightly. A long time ago -- or maybe not that long ago, because there’s a point in which it all blends together -- sitting stoically on a cold seat with what she knows is an even colder face, fingers clenched around a knife that she refuses to let go of, while Nick Fury stands above her and lectures about some protocol that she’ll need to follow when they actually get off the plane. And then there’s Clint, perched beside her with one leg propped up, holding out some strange looking red candy with swirly dents in the side, and he’s grinning at her while chewing thoughtfully.

(She had just told him she wanted to kill him, had shoved a knife against his throat and drew lines of blood across his skin, and instead of putting her in handcuffs he’d put up his feet and offered her a goddamn _twizzler._ She should’ve known right then and there that of course he’d be the one who would have a wife and a farm, with a tractor and chickens and an alpaca named Sharp Shooter.)

“Hey.” And Clint’s voice is suddenly heavy in her ear, pushing through the distorted memories that seem to be piling on top of one another in an attempt to remind her of everything that she’s managed to compartmentalize over the years. She looks up as one hand wraps around her knee and it takes her a moment of blinking to realize she must have nodded off somewhere between an earlier conversation and the jet ceasing movement.

“Look, I didn’t have a chance to tell Laura we were coming. Kids aren’t gonna understand…this.” He waves his hand around loosely. “Mostly, they’ll just be excited to see you since it’s been awhile.”

Natasha nods as the words start to string themselves together into sentences, and swallows down a feeling that tastes like fear. She knows the drill by now; the things about this situation that are old hat, that they don’t even need to discuss at length. Failed mission or not, Laura will know in an instant that she’s not alright, but she won’t say anything -- and anyway, that doesn’t mean Cooper and Lila’s worlds have to stop just because there are grown-up things taking precedence. For Natasha, there was always something strangely comforting about routine, and about Clint doing what he always did -- putting her first, while protecting his family at the same time.

“I know.”

“You think you can handle it?” Clint asks quietly, his eyes searching her face, and Natasha closes her own. It’s not that she _can’t_ handle it, it’s the fact that she knows she _has_ to handle it, because she doesn’t have a choice. She pushes herself unsteadily to her feet in response while Clint grips her more securely, steering her towards the door, one arm wrapped tightly around her shoulder as they exit into overwrought sunlight, browned grass crunching beneath their feet.

 

***

 

Clint texts her three hours after they arrive and Natasha has to look twice to make sure the message isn’t “level green” or “plain potatoes” or some other thinly veiled code relating to their situation. She can’t imagine anything that would require such an urgent response at this point, but years together have taught her that Clint’s actions never line up with what would be considered logical. She’s used to him calling at four in the morning, meeting up with him in the middle of the night at his Brooklyn apartment without so much as an explanation as to why.

“Still finding work for me after all this time?” she asks dryly as she approaches the half-put together sunroom, sneaking a glance out the window. Tony and Steve are outside and Bruce, she knows, is still upstairs.

“Kind of.” Clint hands her a thick stack of manila folders. “Thought you might want to keep busy in here so you didn’t have to spend too much time with the kids.” There’s a knowing look in his eyes and she manages a smile, her fingers unconsciously ghosting over the lower half of his jaw.

“You didn’t get hit,” she says because everything about their situation right now feels so much like New York that she feels like she has to reassure herself that he really is (somewhat) alright. Clint huffs out a laugh.

“By the Maximoff girl?” He makes a face, crossing his arms over his chest. “No. That arrow Stark helped me design got my brain a free pass this time around. I never thought I’d actually need it, to be honest.”

“There’s a first time for everything.” Natasha sits down in one of the chairs and then meets his eyes when she realizes his gaze hasn’t moved from where she’s positioned her body. “What?”

“Nothing,” he says after another moment that seems too long. “Just wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

“You wanna feed me a candy bar and stroke my hair?” Natasha asks sarcastically. “I’m right here.” She knows that’s not the answer he’s looking for but she can tell that Clint’s been figuring she’ll avoid the question anyway, and also that he isn’t going to press her about it.

“Lemme know if you need anything before dinner. I’m gonna get changed.” He closes the door quietly behind him; it bangs shut too loudly and as she makes herself comfortable against the cushions, she also makes a mental note to tell him that he needs to add “tighten hinges” to the list of home renovations that he can’t seem to get away from. Natasha settles in and tries to relax her mind, is about halfway into the papers Clint’s saddled her with -- some truly boring report details about an assignment in Guatemala -- when she hears her name filtering through the half open door.

“But I wanna go play with Auntie Nat.”

There’s a grunt and then the creaking of feet against the floorboards, and Natasha imagines Clint leaning down to scoop up an armful of three feet and two inches of scrawny limbs and curly hair that will undoubtedly, at some point, find itself curled into a ball against his chest.

“Auntie Nat’s a little tired right now. We had a really long ride. You know, like those long rides you take when you go on a field trip for school? Why don’t you go help get her bed together and maybe if you let her rest, she’ll read you a story later.”

(Six years ago, while on a rogue mission gone bad, Clint had brought Natasha to the farm in lieu of not having anywhere else to go. Natasha still didn’t particularly trust Laura -- at least, not all the way -- but Clint’s wife was better with a needle than he was and so Natasha had let the other woman sew up the gash in her side with minimal antiseptic, because she refused to be taken to any kind of hospital. The guest bedroom was still being renovated then, more sawdust and plaster than an actual space, and in its stead Natasha had been relegated to the couch with a handful of pills and one of those stupid little bells that looked like it belonged in the 1930’s.

“And now you’re a regular simple woman,” Clint had said jokingly before he left her alone, and she had practically snarled at the fact that he thought she could be anything more than an assassin or an agent, let alone a carefree country girl. She had lain on the couch fighting waves of lingering pain, while the moon shone rectangles of silver into the farmhouse windows, being eventually brought out of her stupor by a small voice and tiny fingers on top of her scalp.

“I hope you feel better, Auntie Nat.”

Natasha doesn’t keep a diary. Natasha hates keeping tabs on dates and moments that should be meaningful, because they remind her too much of the times when she _had_ to keep ledgers, and what each mark in those ledgers meant. It had taken her years to forget Odessa, to forget Bali and Syria and London and Guam. But she had made a note after that day, had scribbled onto some spare papers that Laura left out on the coffee table, the first day that someone other than Clint, someone who had no knowledge of her past, treated her like she wasn’t automatically a threat to the world. During breakfast the next morning, she crumpled the note deep into the pocket of her borrowed robe and later, in the privacy of the bathroom, smoothed it out and tucked it into the front sleeve of her backpack.

When she finally made it home, she hid it in the bottom drawer of her bedside table, underneath her spare gun and cheesy romance novels, as if keeping it nearby could be any kind of reminder of the fact that she was worth anything.)

 

***

 

 _I dreamed I was anything other than what they made me_ , she tells Bruce after his shower, trying to make him understand what she had seen and why it had hurt. She hopes opening up and matching his own vulnerability will do something that her recent conversations haven’t been able to achieve: unlock that last bit of connection she’s been struggling to find since they perfected the stupid lullaby neither of them expected would even work in the first place.

The words in her brain come out sounding hollow, stilted and stale, as if she’s reminding herself that being this fragile with someone who isn’t Clint is wrong, like she’s trying too hard. So when Bruce continues to pull away, Natasha finds that the continued failure isn’t surprising. Her attempts to find solace with the one person she thought might be able to understand her have fallen flat, one after another, leaving her feeling a little selfish and a lot stupid. It was never supposed to be like this -- she was never supposed to be this vulnerable, she was never supposed to be this involved, just like she was never supposed to be on the other end of that arrow, was never supposed to have anyone trust her, was never supposed to be lying in borrowed housewife clothes, in a bed she’s spent too much time in, in a house that’s the closest thing she’s ever had to a real home since before she was Natasha, Natashka, Natalia.

She clings to the promise of soft covers and a quiet mind and instead dreams and dreams and dreams, snapshots of moments that reach through the darkness of her brain, digging their fingers inside. The cold chill of the gurney cuts through her thin hospital gown, the antiseptic is a cruel assault on her senses and her limbs are immobile -- a paralyzing, frightening pain holding her hostage to a position where she has no choice but to stare at the harsh overhead lights that she knows are a gateway to her worst fears. She blinks and sees a fragile girl, someone made of breakable parts, a handgun in her grasp and a puppet in her line of sight; she blinks again and sees a girl made of metal, synonymous with the weapon that fires over and over into the squirming (and then still) figure whose eyes plead _no_ and _why_ and _help_. She blinks again and there are hands around her waist, hands around her throat, she should be stronger and she should be better but she’s tired, she’s tired and it’s hard to breathe and she’s _tired_ and she’s not made of metal, she’s made of plastic. And plastic breaks, and plastic dies.

The moments split apart, morphing into giant sized, uncontrollable waves that blanket her, a growing weight on her chest exacerbated by the burn in her lungs, and only slivers of air seem to be able to make it past her lips. Natasha opens her mouth to gasp and instead clamps down on a scream, and there’s darkness but there are other things, too, like the whir of the electric fan and the thin blankets covering her legs and the soft whoosh of a breeze from the open window. It takes her another moment still to realize she’s pressed up against the headboard of the bed, her silent gulps accompanying a heart that she feels is beating out of her chest -- a dizzying, overpowering melody.

 _Level out. Level out. Level out._ She can hear her voice but can’t focus; there’s sweat drying across the back of her neck and not enough air in her lungs, and her fingers are bloodless white. Natasha kicks back the covers, suddenly desperate for some kind of release that she can’t seem to grasp.

 _Level out_ , Clint says, except he’s not there, but it’s his voice she hears as she sucks in oxygen. Years ago, in a room just like this one, before he knew better, she had beat him senseless and in return he had hunched over her broken body, one bleeding hand pressed to her back as she faltered. She had been red and he had been red and in that moment, they had both been red.

_Level out._

Natasha breathes -- once, twice, three times -- raises her head and then gets out of bed, pulling herself to full height on shaking legs. She finds a spare washcloth in the attached bathroom and runs it over her face, fixes her hair and strips out of her soaked clothes before grabbing new ones, Laura’s shirts and pants from before her pregnancy -- a little too big but they’ll work, for now. When she feels like she can look in the mirror without detecting any sort of visible horror, she carefully opens the door and makes her way downstairs.

Sleep most certainly isn’t going to happen tonight, she can at least admit _that_ defeat even if she’s still refusing to accept the other ones.

“Can’t sleep?”

She’s surprised (but not) to see Clint sitting backwards in the kitchen chair with his chin resting purposefully on the wood; one look at his face and she knows he’s in the same boat. The bags under his eyes are more pronounced than usual, his face awash in the same kind of grey pallor that signals he might be sick, that she recognizes from when he would wake up from nightmares after Loki. His own fingers are white knuckled around the stem of the chair the same way hers had been earlier, and he looks far too alert for her to even entertain the idea he’s tried to get any kind of rest, despite the fact she knows he has to be going on at least 24 hours of being awake.

“Yeah,” she says and Clint nods, screwing his eyes shut.

“Yeah,” he repeats, blinking rapidly. “Funny thing...me neither.”

Natasha waits to see if he’ll say more and when he doesn’t, she meets his gaze head on. She can see his broken parts pushing through a usually rigid demeanor, doesn’t have to wonder if he sees her own cracks in return, then instantly remembers the days when she would despise showing any kind of misstep that gave away the fact she was incapable of handling her own mind. That had fallen by the wayside over the years, replaced with intimate touches and learned instincts and it was almost acceptable now, being fractured the way they both were. Clint pushes back, looping his legs away from the chair, and rubs at the side of his head.

“Laura’s been out for hours.” 

“She hasn’t been sleeping well,” Natasha says automatically, catching herself when she sees the look in his eye. She knows if it was Clint, he wouldn’t have bothered to even tell Laura about his injury. But Natasha doesn’t play those games and has no problem going behind his back, and she knows as much as Clint hates that, he trusts her to make those calls.

He shakes his head, silently hand-waving the apology away before she can even start. “Wanna take a walk?”

Natasha responds by moving forward, and Clint places his hand at the small of her back as he follows her out the door. It’s roughly somewhere in the vicinity of one in the morning, she figures, trying to think back on what the numbers on her phone had read when she had grabbed it off the nightstand.

“Pretty depressing to think that Ultron wants all of this gone,” Clint says as they make their way down the steps and across the grass, leaving the house in the distance. When Natasha turns, she can see the outline of the sloping roof against the sky, a handful of lights burning holes in otherwise dark windows. She counts four or five, tries to mentally figure out who they belong to, aside from the one she knows is coming from Lila’s room.

“Why do we do this?”

Clint shrugs, arching his neck backwards in a way that allows her to see the contour of his jawline in full. “So we can prove to ourselves that we’re worth something.”

“I asked you why _we_ do it, not why you do it,” Natasha says evenly, stopping in her tracks and Clint gives her a sharp side-eye.

“Jesus, Nat.”

“Don’t _Jesus, Nat_ me. You didn’t just get your mind warped.”

“ _This_ time,” Clint throws back bitterly and Natasha can almost see the frustration rising off of him in waves.  “You really wanna play this game, Romanoff?”

She doesn’t, not really, and so in lieu of saying something else she knows she’ll probably regret in a few hours she looks away, feeling Clint snake his fingers across her palm. She curls their hands together tightly, trying to focus on one of the lone cars sputtering by in the distance.

“If we keep walking, we’ll eventually hit town.”

“Is that what you want?” Clint asks, and Natasha hears the unasked question in his voice. _Is that what you really want? To run away and never look back? To pretend you have no responsibility for any of this?_ Early on in their relationship, she had made the mistake of assuming that being with Laura meant that Clint was choosing to hide from everything that existed in a world that wasn’t run by guns and machines and secret codes.

(“Are you for real?” Clint had been in the middle of feeding Lila, while Natasha sat on the porch next to him. Natasha had frowned, taken aback by the suddenly caustic tone in her partner’s voice.

“Yes?” She had inquired, feeling her brow furrow automatically. For Natasha, there were only two choices in life: live it, or pretend that it didn’t exist. She didn’t know what it felt like to have any kind of choice, to be allowed to have something that made you whole and real even if it had to be a secret, without letting it detract from your every day work. Clint had lowered the angle of the bottle slowly, shifting so that he could burp the baby until she spit some disgusting looking goo onto the towel draped over his shoulder.

“This isn’t running away,” and his tone was stiff where it bit off words. “This is my life.”

“Then I don’t understand,” Natasha responded, because she didn’t. “You showed me your life. This isn’t it.”

“This is _part_ of it,” Clint said, tempering his tone. “Laura, the kids, the farm...they’re not here because I’m trying to get away from anything. They’re hidden because I’m choosing to keep them off the radar, so that they’ll be safe. But I married Laura out of my own free will, because I loved her.”

And there is was, the seemingly magic word, the thing that she knows will forever distance her from this kind of life: _love._ Natasha had never known any kind of love, not unless it came in the form of payment.

“It’s true, you know.” Laura had appeared out of nowhere behind her, as if she had inherited Natasha’s spy moves. She crouched to take the squirming baby from Clint’s arms, bouncing Lila slightly on her hip. “Even if you don’t believe it.”

“Give it time, she might,” Clint had volleyed back and suddenly, Natasha had felt like she was stuck in the middle of some strange version of playing house.)

“Is that what you really want?” Clint asks again, this time a little more sharply, and Natasha feels herself become unsteady. She had been so sure about trying to get away, and she’s realizing that maybe she’d been wrong to admit that to Bruce after all.

“I want to go into town,” she decides. There’s a bar that she knows, one that her and Clint are used to frequenting, and a diner and a gas station and a small country store. Clint purses his lips.

“That’s a long walk.”

“We’ve got the whole night,” Natasha offers, inclining her head back towards the farm. “They’ll sleep, but I can’t. And I know you can’t, either.” What she really wants is to be away from the house. What she really wants is to be alone, but not really, because she doesn’t think she can handle that much physical distance right now.

“I can’t,” he agrees and Natasha squeezes their hands together. For all his ability to turn himself off mentally, he’s terrible at hiding his emotions, and it’s a relief when she realizes they’re on the same page more than he would admit to.

 

***

 

Clint’s idea of a dive bar isn’t exactly Natasha’s idea of a dive bar, except for when they’re at the farm, in which case both of them make a concession when it comes to cheap beer and even cheaper food. Natasha also apparently makes an exception for places built next to a truck stop, where huge U-Hauls idle in every five seconds, their tire tracks reverberating through the walls, and places that look like they should have been banned after 1997 thanks to fluorescent lighting and abandoned pool tables and a jukebox that only has three albums in it. She slides into a booth in the back corner over a soundtrack of _Sweet Caroline_ , while Clint takes up residence at the bar, returning in less then a minute with two full pitchers of Sam Adams and two plastic cups.

“Maggie’s working,” Clint says, giving a small wave towards the petite blonde and Natasha’s honestly surprised that Maggie even remembers they exist. “Says she misses you almost as much as she misses the tips.”

“That’s sweet,” Natasha remarks, nodding towards the pitcher. “Beer me.”

Clint blinks once and then breaks into a grin, grabbing the jug. “Yes, ma’am.”

“You’re not at home, don’t you dare try and wife me, Barton.”

“Yes, _ma’am_.”

They down their first rounds in less time than it usually takes them to finish each other’s sentences, and in the silence Natasha thinks about the first time Clint had taken her to this bar, partially to integrate her into his life and partially to talk her down from running away after overhearing Laura tell Clint she was a little wary about Natasha’s presence. “A little wary” had come about thanks to several broken ribs in Lagos, a head wound in Tokyo, and a sprained wrist in Manila -- all standard injuries, in Natasha’s opinion, so really, she hadn’t figured out why “Laura’s not entirely keen with me bringing a former assassin home right now.”

(“For the record,” she had told Clint once while trying valiantly not to throw up from her concussion, “I don’t exactly _try_ to extend my medical record.”

“You think I care?” Clint had smiled. “My rap sheet before I met you was _way_ longer than any of your ledgers. I was practically a regular in Medical. Got me on the good stuff without a prescription.”

“Yeah, well, you seem to be doing okay right now,” and she had tried to keep the bite out of her voice even though she knew it wasn’t exactly a fair assessment, given that he had just been released from the hospital the a week earlier with a collection of bruised ribs. She’s reckless, she knows, far more reckless than Clint, which is both part of the problem and exactly the problem -- together, they tended to rush into things headfirst, which meant that one or both of them ended up not only on the receiving end of a tirade, but also on the receiving end of doctor visits more often than most agents.

“I got you for those other injuries now,” Clint had responded, taking her hand and if Natasha hadn’t been in so much pain she would’ve laughed, because the statement was, in true Clint fashion, complimentary and ludicrous all at once.)

“So Laura wants me to turn the sunroom into the baby’s room,” Clint says as Natasha takes the cup from his outstretched hand. “Thing is, I was planning on making that into Laura’s workspace. As a surprise kind of thing, since she hasn’t had a lot of time to herself. Also, it’s downstairs, and I’m not sure how comfortable I feel about, you know, the whole distance thing with a newborn.”

“You could move Cooper’s room downstairs,” Natasha suggests, before taking a long drink. “Or put another crib in Lila’s room for awhile. Make the sunroom a playroom or something, it’s big enough.”

“Yeah,” Clint muses, pouring his own beer. “Maybe. A playroom could be nice.” The soundtrack switches over to Bob Dylan then, a low lilting melody of _Mr. Tambourine Man_. “So the last time we were here,” and Natasha’s honestly not surprised Clint remembers _the last time we were here_ because he’s got a memory only beat by those who actually are proven to have a photographic one, “you were talking about what you would do if the world ended.”

“So?” Natasha asks, only slightly caught off guard in the switch in conversation. She vaguely remembers the exchange, one that had been rooted in jokes to cover up the very real fact that they might be hopelessly on their own, when she had left Sam and Steve in DC. Natasha had gotten in a car and driven for hours until she had arrived at the farm, where Clint had been working outside, and he hadn’t seemed overly surprised to see her since Natasha would have never called to say she was coming, anyway. They had spent more than five hours together at the bar drinking beer and eating sliders and chicken wings, while Natasha told Clint stories about Fury and the Winter Soldier, and of Odessa and Hydra and SHIELD.

“Well, turns out that the world might actually end,” Clint says, raising his glass. “In a pretty spectacular fashion, if those punks keep up with Ultron.”

“A robot and two enhanced humans are going to drive us to extinction,” Natasha says dully, twisting a finger around the rim of her cup. “Can’t say I didn’t see it coming.”

“Did you?” Clint asks suddenly, and Natasha snaps her head up to stare at him because it’s not what Clint’s saying, it’s more what he’s _not_ saying.

_What did you see? Why can’t you sleep? What compromised you so much that you were more shook up than I’ve ever seen you in your life and why won’t you tell me about it?_

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me,” Clint interjects. “And it matters to Laura.”

“It doesn’t,” Natasha insists, feeling her stomach braid itself into knots. After Clint had brought her in, they had tried the whole talking thing. It had ended with Natasha breaking his wrist, and she’s pretty sure he had never explained that one to his wife in full detail.

“Nat,” and his voice is tired, wearing at the edges. “Come on. It’s two in the morning and we’re kicking it in a fucking dive bar like a couple of kids who snuck out of their parents house. When was the last time we had a moment to ourselves?”

(It was three weeks ago, Natasha knows, a quiet interlude in between Hydra rampages when, still reeling from a mission where a close call had left her shaken, she had pushed herself too hard at Stark Tower’s gym and injured herself by accident. Hiding bruised skin and bleeding knuckles, she had snuck herself into his room where he was hoarding the first aid kit, and it was the first time in a long time that they both weren’t tied up with other things.

“Hey.” He had sat on the bed and helped tape her fingers together without comment, failing to mention her injuries, or the fact he knew exactly why she had let herself fall over the edge. “Your punches are looking pretty good for someone who uses guns all the time.”

Natasha hadn’t felt like going back to her workout after that, and they had spent the rest of the afternoon lying on top of the covers watching old episodes of _Doctor Who,_ stopping only when Clint decided JARVIS could help them order in.)

Natasha looks down into her glass, focusing on the fact that the reflection of her face looks distorted in the amber liquid. It’s not like she hadn’t expected she would have to talk about things if they spent time together. It’s what she had wanted, in theory.

“I’ve been compromised,” she says finally, not lifting her head. “I saw memories of who I used to be. Memories of who I was before they made me someone else.”

_I’ve got red in my ledger. I’d like to wipe it out._

“The Red Room,” Clint acknowledges, spreading his fingers along the table and Natasha feels a lump settle into her throat again.

“Yeah.” She downs the rest of her drink, as if doing so will make the feeling in her chest go away. “The Red Room.”

“Early years?” Clint asks a little too nonchalantly as he pours another beer without bothering to break the conversation. Natasha finds herself nodding and Clint sighs.

“You were fucked up, Nat. I could tell when I found you. Don’t think after all this time that I’m going to judge you for it.”

“I don’t think that,” she says a little miserably. “But I guess I realized -- remembered -- that I’m never going to be maternal.”

Clint raises an eyebrow at the statement she knows comes out of nowhere. “You seem to do alright with Lila.”

“Alright isn’t everything,” and maybe she’s had too much beer already because the room shakes when she blinks, like she’s bouncing around in a snow globe. She reaches across the table and pulls the cup back towards her.

“In the Red Room, our handlers called them mind games,” she continues slowly. “A way of getting inside your head, showing you your worst fears, the ones that you’d be better off forgetting.” She doesn’t know what kinds of things Steve and Thor had been shown, whether Wanda had been able to dig deep enough into their brains to bring out previously repressed memories, or if their visions had been taken from more recent events.

“Tear us apart from the inside,” Clint confirms, emptying the second pitcher with a firm shake. “That’s Ultron’s plan, isn’t it? To turn us against each other? What’s better than waging a war that you can already win by sheer power alone?” He pauses, allowing the question to sink in. “Divide and conquer. If we’re all unable to perform, if none of us trust each other, it’s a pretty surefire way to induce failure.”

Natasha leans forward, noticing the careful way he’s culling his tone. “The circus?”

“Barney,” he corrects shortly. “Swordsman took us for all we had, and I don’t just mean the found family thing. He used my talent to screw us over pretty quickly. Even though he was my brother...well, you tell someone something, make them believe it enough, whatever history you have eventually doesn’t matter.”

Natasha had wondered, after arriving at the farm, what Clint’s vision would have been if Wanda hadn’t been stopped. Loki would be the obvious choice, a holdover that Natasha knows has never really faded, old memories that were heavily scarred but able to be re-opened with a simple twist of a blade. But there are other horrors there too, ones that she knows are just as painful as being brainwashed -- his father’s abuse and drinking, his orphanage days, and his years in the army, spots of a timeline that Natasha is still trying to piece together with Laura’s help because no matter how close they become with each other, there are things that he just won’t ever say.

“For the record, I don’t know what I would’ve seen,” Clint says, as if he can read her mind. She figures he might as well be able to, that here, alone with him and with no one else around to think about hurting, her thoughts are probably written all over her face. “But as insane as it sounds, I hope to god it would be that blue-eyed bastard and not my dad punching me in the face over and over again, because that would at least be something I could fight back against.”

Natasha reaches forward and grabs for his hand, then thinks better of it, getting up and sliding into Clint’s side of the booth. She feels him startle in surprise before he relaxes, wrapping an arm around her in return.

“Nat?”

She dreamed once that someone would see her for someone other than what she was, someone other than a person out for blood or savage revenge. Now, she realizes that she could never have had that with anyone before Clint, because no one would have ever let her become this vulnerable around them and then let her stay.

“You’re my best friend,” and okay, maybe she _is_ a little tipsy but maybe she’s also thinking of New York and being reminded of how damn close she came to losing him, something she forgets about it until they share a dumb moment over beer, away from the distractions of a fire fight or the world ending. She curls her fingers into his shoulder and Clint runs a hand over her hair.

“Was I ever not?”

(The closest Natasha had ever come to death aside from the Battle of New York -- which they all agreed didn’t quite count -- was during a raid in Paraguay, when someone had set off a grenade a little too close to where she had been trying to rescue a trapped civilian. The blast had decimated most things and people in its path, and debris from the explosion had torn through her flesh, and she had mostly survived thanks a pillar she had managed to crouch behind, making herself small enough so that it was able to function as a sort of makeshift shield.

She doesn’t remember much of anything after that except Clint yelling at her as she tried not to pass out and then later, reassuring her when she woke up feeling like she was back where she had started so many years ago, being poked and prodded against her will. She was off duty for five months following the accident, a slow healing process aggravated by an even slower round of physical therapy, with Fury refusing to sign off on her recovery until she could prove herself capable of handling a firearm again. Clint had taken some time off to help with her healing, and Laura had sent her flowers and get well cards that came with smudged crayon drawings, Natasha’s name spelled out in multicolored lines, complete with a backwards “n” and “s” for good measure. Still, Natasha remembers being more than a little surprised when she reported for her first day back and found out that it was Clint’s first day back as well.

“You haven’t been working?” she had asked after they left the office, having been debriefed at least ten times over, because if there was one thing she had learned about Clint, it was that he liked working better than he liked drinking coffee. He shrugged.

“Haven’t needed to,” he had responded a little cagily, following her down the stairs because neither one of them wanted to deal with the elevator that was the rush of SHIELD’s lunch hour. “Turns out, there’s a lot of paperwork that piles up when you take a few days off. And since I’m terrible at things that require number crunching, it takes forever.”

“Bullshit,” Natasha had called before he could make it another two steps down, her voice carrying into the hollow stairwell. “Fury only gave you two weeks of sabbatical and as far as I’m aware, you haven’t been to the farm. Why didn’t you go back to work? They could’ve found you someone else to work with in a second.”

“Yeah, they _could’ve_ ,” Clint said, turning around with a perfunctory sigh, as if he’s annoyed that she’s missing the point of something. “But I didn’t want to work with anyone else if it wasn’t you. Okay?”

Natasha had stopped in her tracks, grabbing onto the railing to keep herself from stumbling on the stairs. “Why?”

“Because you’re my partner, and you’re my friend,” Clint had said with a smile that seemed almost shy. “Why would I want to spend the time getting to know someone new? Besides...if I went into the field on my own, who was going to be there to get my back?”)

In the bar, Clint nudges her gently and Natasha presses against him more tightly as she ruminates on an answer. “No,” she admits, leaning her head into his neck. “You were a good friend, first. But you were always my best friend. You just became better.”

“So I’m your best friend _and_ your good friend,” Clint assesses, kissing her on her scalp. Natasha snorts quietly.

“You fed me candy. After I tried to kill you.”

“Yeah,” Clint says with a small grin. “I did. Isn’t that what best-good friends do?”

“That’s what terrible friends do,” she points out as a bad cover version of _Summer Nights_ starts to play over the speakers. It’s what Clint does, and it’s what Natasha remembers, and she lets herself zone out, placated by the fact that at least that memory is something she doesn’t mind thinking about.

_When was the last time we had a moment to ourselves?_

It was different being with Clint here because it just was, and she knows it wouldn’t be the same if they were in the house or even in the barn, within reach of people that they felt like they had to be careful around. Maggie at the counter was one thing, even the regulars Clint could pick out now and again were another thing, but it wasn’t enough to know there was a clear divide between their relationship and everyone else in their day-to-day lives.

A crash in the corner jars her more than she feels comfortable with, and it’s only when she raises her head that she notices an overly drunken man trying to push his way through a series of knocked over bar stools.

“You know what I like about coming here?” Clint asks, seemingly oblivious to the noise. “These people don’t have the first damn clue that the world might end tomorrow.”

“And sitting in the fray are two people who know it could end at any moment,” Natasha mutters. “Typical.”

Clint sighs, the escaping air telling her more than she needs to know. “You can’t tell me this doesn’t help you to take a step back.”

Natasha can’t, because it’s true. When Clint had brought her to the farm after a break from the first round of SHIELD’s psychological tests, Natasha had thought he was crazy. Clint hadn’t been bothered.

(“The way I see it, this is exactly what you need right now,” he had said, bypassing the fact that she’d had nightmares for a week straight, ones that left her screaming, her throat hoarse and her eyes bloodshot. “Escape from the world, my kids being annoying, and Laura making you tea.”

He had been right, as Natasha eventually realized he always was when it came to taking care of anyone other than himself. Laura hadn’t even known Natasha well enough to be sure she wasn’t going to turn around and throw a dart at the back of her skull but she had been more than accommodating about the situation, even offering to cook Natasha her favorite foods. It was a change to come back to headquarters a week later and be surrounded by shiny, squeaky clean people who all gave her smiles that she could tell -- because she gave them out herself -- were less than genuine.)

“I feel like that man would be me if I had to drive right now,” Natasha says a little drowsily, running her fingers along Clint’s leg. He hums, a deep, connected reverberation that she feels emitting from his chest.

“Then it’s a good thing we’re not driving,” and she can tell from the way he’s leaning against the booth that he’s probably in the same boat -- comfortably tipsy, just enough to feel okay with the world without actually being inebriated. He pushes himself up, arching his back and Natasha flinches.

“You’re going to re-open your injury,” she says a little too roughly, her hand automatically going to his side. There’s warmth there, heat bleeding through the thin flannel, and it makes her anxious, like it’s alien, like it’s foreign. Helen Cho had said that in the end, Clint would be made of Clint, but Natasha knows what it’s like to be taken apart and then put back together by science. No matter who was doing the job of piecing you back together, you were never really the same.

“Can’t re-open it unless I get shot in the same place twice.” He gives her a look. “You’re not going to deny me that honor, are you?”

“I’ll deny you the honor of making me worry for days on end about your condition,” Natasha retorts, following his lead and sitting up. “Come on, Hawkeye.”

She slides out of the booth and holds out her hand, which he takes as his other hand shoves a handful of bills underneath the empty pitcher. Clint gives a small wave to Maggie as they walk slowly out of the bar, his arm tight around Natasha’s shoulder.

“Next time,” he says as he pushes open the door, “we’ll order wings.”

 

***

 

Outside, the air is colder than Natasha thinks it should be for the fact that it’s mid-May, and she finds herself shivering out of instinct as Clint joins her.

“Coffee?” He asks while staring at the neon flashing sign across the street, the one hanging precariously off the diner overhang. There’s sandpaper in his words when he talks, a hesitancy in his step that she knows means he’s slightly off kilter, verging on out of control. If he went back to the house like this, Laura would know in a minute. Natasha can tell in less than a second. She tugs on his arm and stops him in his tracks, leaning back against the outside wall of the bar.

“Don’t do this to yourself, Clint.”

The surprise in his eyes is more than palpable. “Do what?”

“Think about dying.” There’s a stubbed out cigarette lying in the gutter by her feet and the gold embers make her think of burning, of cities on fire. A noticeable crease in the middle of Clint’s brow catches her attention, before it evens out.

“What am I supposed to think of?” He sags against the wall with her, as if asking the question is a cue to let down his guard completely. “What other choice do I have?”

“At least consider the fact that this is going to be like any other mission.”

Clint shakes his head. “I can’t,” he says, balling his fists by his side. “No matter what happens, it’s going to end badly. Ultron’s going to eliminate everyone in the world, and even if he doesn’t…” he trails off, staring up at the sky, and Natasha follows his gaze. The whole conversation feels achingly familiar and chilling all at once.

“It’ll be like New York all over again.”

Clint moves his jaw back and forth. “Something like that, yeah.”

She rolls her head, feeling the tension in her neck and shoulder, old injuries re-surfacing in the wake of the day pushing down on her, reminders of a life that make her feel a lot older than her thirty-one years. “That was your nightmare?”

She sees the moment when she thinks he might refute her words before he closes his eyes, almost in defeat. “Basically. You?”

“The vision,” she says simply, because she knows she doesn’t need to say anything else, least of all that her insomnia came because of a memory so volatile it shook her to the core. “You know when we get back, they’ll want to figure out what to do. When to leave.”

“As soon as possible, if everyone has their way,” Clint agrees, shoving his hands into his pockets, voicing what she knows he understands. There’s going to be no time for them to have any other kind of reprieve, no moment where they get to stop and try to deal with their demons before they have to push on to the next big thing, pretending that what happened on the freighter didn’t matter. “We all know that maybe we don’t walk out of this intact.”

“And you?” She asks quietly, glancing over. “You’ve never been afraid of dying before.” The thought was something they had either welcomed or accepted, but never something they feared; it was part of what they dealt with knowing what the day-to-day of their job entailed. Clint had given up any semblance of being worried about sacrificing himself the day he joined the army and then SHIELD -- Natasha had never had a choice in the matter.

“Guess the stakes are higher,” Clint admits, and Natasha doesn’t have to ask what he means. She suppresses another small shudder as her bones quake with the unrelenting chill of Midwestern wind, and then Clint’s arm is an anchor on her body.

(They never came to places like The Standard Hotel -- the last time they were there was for an undercover mission at least three years ago -- but it’s where she finds him when both his apartment and his room at Avengers Tower are empty.

“If you jump, it’s a long way down,” Natasha had said conversationally as she joined him, leaning against the balcony rail, keeping just enough space between them. Clint had fisted his hands harder against the metal.

“Flying onto the roof from that alien... _motorcycle_ was the stupidest thing you’ve ever done, you know.”

“Because throwing yourself through a window wasn’t,” Natasha had responded tartly, her eyes roving over the marks on his arms, tanned flesh peppered by spots of white bandages where still-deep cuts had yet to heal. They were the most visible scars of his experiences, though Natasha knew they were hardly the worst. “I’m not going to tell Laura, by the way.”

“That I almost killed you?”

“That you were about as reckless as you’ve always historically been,” she had shot back sarcastically, turning around. “I know what he told you.” Clint sighs.

“Then you know what I told _him_.”

“You told him my secrets,” Natasha said and now that she’s spent enough time accepting it on her own, it’s a little easier to say the words out loud without feeling uncomfortable or feeling upset. “Believe me, it’s not the first time someone has violated my trust on that front.”

“But it’s me,” Clint had said, an uncharacteristic crack in his words. “It’s me, and you’re you, and we’re...” he had trailed off and Natasha had put her hand on top of his palm.

“There will _always_ be debts, Clint. And always between us. Especially between us. But don’t you dare think those debts are worth giving your life for, unless we’re in agreement about it.”)

“Coffee,” Natasha says, not moving from where he’s holding her and he nods, pushing back from the wall.

 

***

 

It’s approaching four in the morning when they angle onto the stools at the counter -- Natasha manages to glimpse the time on the clock hanging above the kitchen. The establishment is mostly empty, one tired-looking server hunched over the cash register with a thick book who looks up in surprise when they enter; two black coffees with steam rising from the center of the cups and Natasha feels herself start to settle slightly.

“Why Banner?” Clint asks and Natasha stills at the question; it’s not that it’s inappropriate, it’s more that she has no idea how to answer without sounding like she’s a pathetic teenager, the ones she used to roll her eyes at when she would have to pretend to play along with them as part of her more boring infiltration jobs.

“I don’t know,” she says slowly. “I mean, you’re all so eager to run into battle.”

“And you’re not,” Clint says dubiously, taking a sip of coffee. Natasha knows why his tone is the way it is, because it sounds like a lie, because it _is_ a lie, because running into firefight is her life and it always has been.

“I am,” she defends. “But he would rather sit on the sidelines. Because he’s afraid of what he could do if it gets to be too much.”

“And no one else is.”

“ _Everyone_ else is,” Natasha says tiredly. “That’s the problem. I feel like...I don’t know. I feel I need an opposite or something.” She looks down, stirring sugar, watching spots of white appear in the cup. “He knows he can win but he chooses to sit the battle out. He has the option to keep himself away from harm and he does, because he’s worried about what he’ll do...what he just did.”

“Which is all fine and good, except you’ve never needed anyone to balance you out,” Clint notes, the very real tone of _I don’t believe you_ bleeding through his words, and Natasha shakes her head.

“I’ve had you. I still have you.” She swallows. “But you’re not going to have this life forever.”

“What makes you think --”

“Clint, you have a family,” she interrupts, her fingers matching the color of porcelain cup. “You have a wife and kids and you have a responsibility outside of this team. I don’t...even if I share this with you, I never will.”

“And you think I’m just going to give everything up for a country life or some other idealistic American dream?” His voice is becoming harsher now, the lines on his forehead settling into thick grooves, his face contorting into a scowl. “I’ve never _done_ anything else. I’ve been shot, I’ve been broken, I’ve been left for dead -- fuck, I’ve been brainwashed by a Norse god, and I’ve never bothered to stop this life.”

“And maybe you never will,” Natasha says, keeping her voice low. The waitress has retired to the front of the hostess counter, ready for action should anyone else walk in given the time of night. It’s eerie, almost, being alone like this, like they really are the last two people on Earth, trying to make their confessions to each other before it all ends. “I will be Strike Team Delta for the rest of my life, if you’ll let me. If you don’t die on me.”

That gets a forced smile out of him, of all things. “Don’t have me make promises you know I can’t keep, Nat.”

She ignores his comment, knows the weight it holds for both of them. “You can be Hawkeye forever,” she says after a moment. “But I would never stop you if you decided to come home, as long as that was what you wanted.”

(It was what she thought he had wanted two or so years ago when she had found him in his apartment, blinds closed and lights off, surrounded by visibly empty glass bottles after receiving a handful of texts consisting of lines like _i’m a mess don’t bother_ and _why do u care?_

“You can’t keep doing this to yourself,” Natasha had said more gently than she felt the moment deserved, crouching next to his prone form. Yelling, scolding, the hard push into acceptance for his actions would come later -- tomorrow, even, when he was less compromised. “You can’t flush him out this way. It won’t help and it won’t keep him gone.”

“So go report me,” he had slurred, his head covered by his hands. “Can’t have my gun anyway. Can’t even set walk into work without people looking at my sorry ass.”

“Clint, I will let you leave if this is what you want.” Natasha had said, pulling him up into a sitting position, two palms on his shoulders. “If that’s what you really want. But don’t go down this path and use it to run away and hide, because we both know that you’re better than this.”

In the morning, while sitting on the bathroom floor surrounded by towels and half-empty glasses of water, she’ll force him to rehash the conversation, and she’ll give him the same ultimatum. He’ll tell her that he’s not leaving, though that won’t stop him from continuing to spiral, and then she’ll ask him again, and every time the answer will be the same, until the cycle finally breaks.)

“Jesus fuck, Nat.” Clint reaches for her wrist, and Natasha suppresses a smile because Clint only swears openly like that when he means it, and also because his hands are warm from where he’s been holding his coffee and it’s a warmth she welcomes, unlike the strange sensation of heat she’d felt from his injury. “You’re amazing.”

“Well,” Natasha looks down at their entwined fingers, “the truth is a matter of circumstance, right?”

“It’s not all things, to all people, all the time,” Clint continues absently, moving a thumb over her skin. At one time, maybe she would’ve looked the other way, told him _neither am I_ the same way she deflected Steve’s words when he had tried to get her to open up in a stolen truck on the way to New Jersey.

But she doesn’t, because they both know that to each other, that statement has never, ever been true.

 

***

 

It’s nearing five-thirty when they finally push back from the counter, a small collection of cars beginning to pull lazily into the parking lot. Clint steers Natasha down the paved road leading past the town’s small strip of establishments, onto the long stretch of dirt that she knows will eventually lead past the truck stops, past the signs, and past the trees Cooper and Lila like to hang off of during long summer days -- past the big red barn and the corral holding one or two animals and a spare chicken, to the grassy overgrown lawn that leads onto his property.

It’s nearing six-thirty when he helps her up the stairs the same way he did hours earlier, but this time, he wordlessly eases himself down onto the swing while holding out his hand. Natasha stretches out, curling her legs underneath her and putting her head on his chest. A faint pink is pulling at the edges of the dark sky, spots of blood-red orange starting to emerge and shedding radiance on smears of new paint that decorate the porch rails, a reminder of how things can be beat down and then remade, a slow dawn bringing the promise of a new day.

And Laura will be up soon, Natasha knows. The quiet house will be filled with lights and children’s footsteps and coconut flavored pancakes, the smell of too much coffee coupled with awkwardly displaced superheroes stepping around plastic cars and trucks while they attempt to prepare themselves for what they know they can’t anticipate. Natasha turns her attention back to Clint, to the intervals of his breathing, his body firm underneath her own, the stability she’s always craved wrapped up in dive bars and coffee and memories and cheap beer, and she thinks about how maybe soon, the world really will end -- but also how, for a few hours, her own shone a little bit brighter.

**Author's Note:**

> This is, obviously, AoU-compliant and meant to act as a fill-in for what we didn't see in the movie, though it admittedly plays with the timeline a bit as the Avengers seem to spend less than one night at the farm (depending on how you interpret their stay.)


End file.
